The Chemistry Division: 1968-1976

The decade spanning the late sixties and the early seventies saw evolutionary changes year to year,
but when this period was over, the sum of the changes were revolutionary:
research appropriate to the mission of the funding agency broadened
considerably. Nuclear energy was no longer the sole motivation. The energy
crisis of the seventies brought renewed interest in energy production of all
kinds. The federal research budget was severely squeezed in the early
seventies, bringing to Brookhaven (including the Chemistry Division) its
first ever round of traumatic layoffs. Finally, by the end of this period,
the AEC itself had disappeared twice over. It had been replaced first by the
Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA), and ERDA was then
superseded by the cabinet-level Department of Energy. While the closing
(twice!) of the parent federal funding agency may have been disruptive, the
Chemistry Division weathered those particular events with remarkable
equanimity. The programs within the AEC, ERDA, and the DOE that provided
most of the funding to the Chemistry Division changed their names and their
portfolios, but maintained a remarkable amount of continuity throughout the
decade.

In the mid seventies, Morris Perlman (Chemistry Division) and Richard
Watson (Physics Department) began promoting the utility of synchrotron
radiation for studies such as surface photoemission and electron
spectroscopy. The notion of a National Synchrotron Light Source was born,
and by the late seventies, the NSLS project was well underway. The Chemistry Divisionwas to play a major role in the founding of the NSLS and its scientific
program which represented something new for the Chemistry Division:
large-scale participation in the "big" facilities for science that had previously been
deemed "small science".

The primary sources from which the descriptions below were derived are a
series of rather detailed "Annual Reports" which date from the beginning of
the Laboratory, were sometimes biannual, and which gave way, in the late
nineteen sixties, to a roughly biannual publication called Brookhaven
Highlights.

One of ten national laboratories overseen and primarily funded by the Office of
Science of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Brookhaven National Laboratory
conducts research in the physical, biomedical, and environmental sciences, as
well as in energy technologies and national security. Brookhaven Lab also builds
and operates major scientific facilities available to university, industry and
government researchers. Brookhaven is operated and managed for DOE's Office of
Science by Brookhaven Science Associates, a limited-liability company founded by
the Research Foundation for the State University of New York on behalf of Stony
Brook University, the largest academic user of Laboratory facilities, and Battelle,
a nonprofit, applied science and technology organization.